Review: Open Market ShopSite SC 4.1

Open Market ShopSite is a mature, high quality store-building program for up to 5,000 or so products, that is capable enough for professional designers and at the same time friendly and affordable for smaller merchants.

When I began building stores in 1995, I used the tool that was available at the time -- a very sturdy shopping cart program. The stores were beautiful and functional. But they were hard to maintain. A merchant needed to master HTML in order to add products and pages. So the beautiful stores could not keep up as businesses grew and changed.

Then I discovered ShopSite, and have since built stores for clients almost exclusively with that tool. In this review I'll try to outline both its strengths and its weaknesses.

Store-Building Tool

The marketing people at ShopSite didn't like the word "shopping cart." This was a "store building tool," they insisted. I thought it was marketing hype, but they were right. More than just being a convenient basket in which customers can put products, ShopSite provides the environment in which an entire store can be built.

To understand the power of ShopSite you need to understand that it generates its own HTML pages to reflect the changes you make in the Web browser interface. Gone are the days of making store pages with a webpage editor. The key to keeping store on the Web -- if it's a store of any size, that is -- is to build with templates, and then pour data into those templates. Oh, you can build prettier pages by hand with a webpage editor, and occasionally that's necessary. But building an online store is not the chief task; daily maintenance is. Professionally designed templates allow average storeowners to create good looking product pages with a minimum of effort.

Novice vs. Expert

The 4.x version of ShopSite is purposely designed for both novices and experts. Novices can set up their store with a wizard that leads them through the "basic editing" decisions. Experts are allowed to customize a good bit of the store to meet specific objectives. Novices are shown "basic editing" screens in which to insert page and product information. Experts can select "advanced editing" screens that allow many other options. Most tools that are good for novices are too limiting for professionals. But ShopSite does an exceptionally good job of allowing a single tool to serve both groups.

Not that everything is customizable. It's not. Whenever you have a tool that simplifies, that tool also limits what you can do. But after creating about a dozen ShopSite stores, I've found a way to do nearly everything my clients wanted to do within the ShopSite structure.

Set-Up

Once upon a time ShopSite allowed developers to resell the program to their clients with a nice commission. No more. The preferred channels now are web hosting services that Open Market calls Commerce Service Partners (CSPs). This resolves a BIG problem for Open Market, providing installation support for end users -- and ShopSite can be a royal pain to install on a server. But with web hosting services doing the hard work, developers and merchants can skip the biggest obstacle.

When you enter ShopSite for the first time the Wizard greets you and walks you through the basic decisions and steps. You decide what kind of shipping you'll offer, and what the basic color scheme should be (choose from about 32 different color/design combinations). Then the wizard guides you to create a single product and place it on a single page to show you how it's done. At the last step, the wizard "publishes" your pages, and you can see your handiwork. The Wizard, new in version 4, is a big help to simplify what can otherwise seem overwhelming to the novice.

Layout and Graphics

Professional designers will forgo color and layout choices and select "Plain." Then they can construct the entire look and feel of the store by entering HTML code that will appear on every page through the "Universal Header" and "Universal Footer". The top-of-page graphic, the left side navigation menu, and the bottom contact and copyright information can all be fit into this template. Now a newly created page looks every bit as good as the last one. As the left side menu grows, those changes can be made in the Universal Header (though this approach to navigation requires HTML expertise). Ideally, the designer sets up the major sectional pages of the store that appear on the left side menu, and then the merchant can go ahead to add hundreds or thousands of products and pages that will fit within that basic navigation system.

Graphics for the store can be uploaded to a media directory using FTP, or one-by-one using a web browser interface. Then they are available from a drop-down menu for display with any product or page.

Building a Store

Once the program is installed, a ShopSite store is pretty easy to set up, with a colorful user-friendly interface. Perhaps the best way to get acquainted with how ShopSite works is to try out an online demo, both the storefront side that customers will see, as well as the back office where the merchant makes changes and picks up orders. The two building blocks within ShopSite are products and pages. You set up several products and then place them on pages you have created.

Products

The building block is the product. Using a web browser interface, you can add products easily. In the store's back office you select the "products" section, and click on "Add a Product" The next screen gives you a number of fields where you can specify the essentials: product name, SKU number, description, weight, price, etc.

ShopSite also allows you to select a set of options, such as color or size, that appear as a drop-down menu. Another product attribute could be a text field where you might specify the name to be engraved upon a gift, etc. When the product is selected, a merchant-defined caption instructs the shopper to enter the appropriate option.

Pages

The second major building block is the page. In the page section, "Add a Page" brings up another series of fields that specify the page title, context of text blocks on the page (before the products, after the products, or at the very bottom of the page), the page layout, etc.

Since larger stores require a hierarchical menu of sections and subsections, you'll have some page that don't contain any products, only links to other sections. "Linking pages" I call them. The "Add a Page" information enables you to enter a "link name" (that "page name" that will appear as a link on another page), a "link description" (a sentence or two describing the product), and a link graphic (perhaps a thumbnail photo of the product that appears on the page).

Publishing

Once you've created both pages and products, you can begin to place products on pages, and arrange the products in an appropriate order. After a number of pages and products have been added or changed, you "publish" the database. This causes ShopSite to automatically regenerate on your website any HTML pages that have been affected by your changes. Now your changes are visible to your shoppers.

Database Uploads

If you have a store of 100 products or more, it becomes extremely laborious to enter each product and page through the web browser interface. Instead, you spend your time in your desktop environment developing a product database with a database program (Microsoft Access or FileMaker Pro) or a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel). Each major product needs a name, SKU number, description of one to several paragraphs, a photo, a weight, price, and page name. Minor products may be accessories or similar, and so may not need a separate description and photo, but will appear under a major product.

Next, you decide how many major products should appear on a page. Many products are best displayed on their own page. In this case you do some database manipulations so that the major product names also become page names.

Now you upload these files either by FTP or through ShopSite's web browser file upload interface. Though the data upload method of construction -- and maintaining -- a store is extremely powerful, it is also not for the faint-hearted. It'll take a bit of experimentation to get it right. For example, you must load your page database first, then your major product database, and finally your minor product database. This way each the products can find pages already created to dwell on, etc.

Maintenance

For very large stores, it make more sense to maintain a desktop database that can interface with an inventory and order fulfillment system, and upload it every week or so with instructions to update (not write over) any existing records. For smaller stores, an employee can easily be trained to make updates and add products using the web browser interface.

The latest version of ShopSite allows exports of both the product and page databases to tab-delimited files, making it easier to coordinate the online store with offline catalogs and presentations.

Ordering System

The ordering system is quite robust and allows a number of payment methods with the ability to add more. A store can be run by collecting credit card numbers and obtaining batch authorization using an existing merchant credit card system. But it's even easier to set ShopSite up for real-time credit card authorization. Currently Signio (formerly PaymentNet), CyberCash, and AuthorizeNet are supported. Comments on the ShopSite support bulletin board indicate some unresolved issues with AuthorizeNet. However, Signio (http://www.signio.com) installs easily and provides an excellent payment system; I've used it for the last two years and have been quite pleased.

ShopSite's ordering system and error screens can all be configured for any Western language (though high bit languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are not yet supported). There is also a feature that will display the price in a base currency as well as conversion to a second currency (though you need to change the conversion rate daily to keep it up-to-date).

Several sections of the ordering system screens can be configured with a company logo, text about shipping policies, etc., so the customer never has a feeling of leaving the merchant's store. It would be nice to have a customization area right next to the shipping options. Other than that, I've found the customization options quite adequate.

Order Anywhere

One handy feature is the merchant's ability to copy the HTML code for order buttons from ShopSite's "OrderAnywhere" Linker. This HTML code can then be pasted onto webpages hosted on any server in the world. When a shopper on the remote server clicks on one of the product buttons, the shopper is taken to the shopping cart on the server hosting ShopSite. So long as the remote site provides an easy way for the shopper to get to the "check-out stand" ordering page, there's no reason ShopSite has to be hosted on the same server.

It's conceivable that you could sell products on several sites and use a single ShopSite store for the order-taking system. Of course, the customer will need to remember what company the order was placed through, so she recognizes it when she looks at her monthly credit card statement. But this feature greatly extends ShopSite's usefulness.

Shipping, Taxes, and Sales

The shipping calculation system is quite extensive, allowing shipping calculation by weight, price, flat rate, or a combination. The merchant can allow as many shipping options as necessary. For example, if you ship to other countries, you could set up a shipping selection for the most common areas and methods shipped. Selections are displayed on a simple drop-down menu from which the shopper selects her shipping choice. Shipping costs are calculated from tables the merchant fills out in the back office.

Taxes are calculated based on tables completed by the merchant for each state or province where taxes need to be collected. The shopper then selects her state or province and the appropriate tax is calculated. Products can be designated as taxable or non-taxable.

ShopSite Products and Product Maximums

ShopSite is sold in three flavors: Lite, Manager, and Pro.

ShopSite Lite is designed as an introductory product to entice merchants to upgrade to ShopSite Manager. While CSPs can set their own prices for ShopSite, typically ShopSite Lite is free when the merchant pays for hosting. It uses exactly the same code as Manager and Pro, but some features are crippled. Lite allows a maximum of 12 products that can be placed on a maximum of 5 generated web pages. It does not allow real-time credit card authorization. Otherwise, most of the basic features are available to a merchant.

ShopSite Manager is the standard program for many smaller merchants, and has propelled ShopSite into being the most-used shopping cart system on the market. How many products can ShopSite handle?

Since Manager and Pro use exactly the same code, the absolute limits for these should be the same. In fact, Open Market reports that one merchant got up to 45,000 products using ShopSite Manager, though that's far more than it's designed for, and might crash on other servers.

The practical maximums are dictated by checkboxes. With Manager, when selecting the products to be placed on a particular page, the merchant is presented with all the products and a checkbox next to each. When you have 200+ products, that comes out to be a lot of screens with a lot of checkboxes. Pro makes it easier, since you are able to search for products by name, only the products that result from the search are shown with their checkboxes, making the task much easier. (I wonder why Open Market doesn't make a similar search function available for page selections, too, since many merchants desire a single product per page.)

Conceivably, if all the product/page selections were handled by uploading product and page databases, you could handle many more products than are practical using the web browser interface.

ShopSite Pro Features

ShopSite Manager provides an excellent tool for the small storeowner. The Pro version, however, adds features that some storeowners may find necessary. These include:

• Surcharges, permitting, for example, an added charge for gift-wrapping.
• Universal Edit, enabling the same change to be applied to all products or pages without individually editing.
• Customer product search engine
• Associates tracking, a rudimentary affiliate program (reviewed in Web Commerce Today, 3/15/98, http://wilsonweb.com/wct1/980315shopsite-viaweb.cfm) (Not available in the TX version.)
• Per-attribute pricing, allows larger sizes in drop-down menu, for example, to cost more than others.
• Quantity discounts, allows you to offer, for example, 10% of on orders over $100. (Not available in the TX version.)
• Orders API, enables ShopSite to call a separate CGI program after an order is placed to do about anything you need, such as send the order for processing in a legacy system, etc.

Wish List

I've reviewed ShopSite pretty positively. The fact is, that they have done a lot of things right, and have improved the program considerably since I reviewed ShopSite Manager 3.1 in 1997 (Web Commerce Today, 9/15/97, http://wilsonweb.com/wct1/970915shopsite.cfm).

But I still have some criticisms. None of these are major -- just minor flaws in a very good product.

• Price appears next to the order button, below the product description, not higher on the product presentation, such as next to the product name, where you might want to place it.
• The product page templates could use greater flexibility -- in placing photos, for example.
• The user interface graphic hides the names of the icon functions from view unless you run your mouse over the graphic. It's cute, but harder for the novice to learn. Several shopowners who upgraded from ver 3.x to 4.x liked the old interface better. Unfortunately, several of the new icons just aren't very intuitive or recognizable.
• The Pro version includes a product search facility to make it easier for merchants to find products. It needs a similar page search facility, too. This will extend the functional range of a ShopSite Pro store substantially.

Limitations

ShopSite does not enable merchants to sell digital products, such as software, that can be downloaded by the shopper after the sale. This leaves out a significant slice of online merchants. (It could be accomplished with other programming through the Order API, but it would take a lot of work.)

Business-to-Business commerce may find some difficulties using ShopSite-SC, since there is no way to register customers. Even ShopSite-TX doesn't facilitate separate pricing by customer class. One work-around is to set up password protected areas that certain classes of customers are admitted to that display appropriate pricing.

ShopSite-SC is also weak in order fulfillment functions; but this is where ShopSite-TX (reviewed in the November issue) shines, so Open Market is happy to upsell merchants that need more help here.

Summary

You can find many less expensive store building systems. But few compare with ShopSite for ease of use for both merchants AND developers. And none except ShopSite has the backing of e-commerce giant Open Market, which almost guarantees that ShopSite will be supported and improved for years to come. It has been on my A-List since early 1997, and the more recent versions only make it better. I consider it an excellent product for smaller merchants.